One of my research areas is agent-based modelling of land change in Brazil. I have worked with ABM in frontier areas of the Brazilian Amazon. I am also part of the team that develops TerraME, an OSS toolkit for ABM in cellular spaces.

My core research interest is to understand how humans and other living creature perceive and behave; respond and act upon their environment and how this dynamic interplay shapes us into who we are. In recognition of the broad scope of this question I am a strong believer in the need for inter- and multi-disciplinary approaches and have worked at research groups in a wide range of departments and institutions, including university departments of Physics as well as Psychology, a bio-medical research lab, a robotics research laboratory and most recently the RIKEN Brain Science Institute. Though my work has primarily taken the form of computational neuroscience I have also performed psychophysical experiments with healthy human subjects, been involved in neural imaging experiments and contributed towards the development of a humanoid robot.

Based on the philosophy of ‘understanding through creating’ I believe that bio-mimetic and biologically inspired computational and robotic engineering can teach us not only how to build more flexible and robust tools but also how actual living creatures deal with their environment. I am therefore a strong believer in the fertile information exchange between scientific as well as engineering research disciplines.

I am a Professor in the School of Sustainability and the Director of the Center for Behavior, Institutions and the Environment. I want to understand how people solve collective problems at different levels of scale, especially those problems related to sustainability of our environment. Our society experience unprecedented challenged to sustain common resource for future generations at a scale we have never experienced before. What makes groups cooperate? What is the role of information? How does the ecological context affect the social fabric? How do they deal with a changing environment? How can we use these insight to address global challenges? To do this research I combine behavioral experiments, agent-based modeling and case study analysis.

I am interested in the dynamics of cultural transmission, especially in diffusion of religious innovations (concepts and practices) across a population. In my dissertation, I am targeting this issue while studying and modelling the development of Christian meal practices in the first four centuries CE across the Roman Mediterranean.

Our overriding approach has been to advance the state-of-the-art in conducting large-scale simulation studies, by developing and disseminating experimental designs that facilitate the exploration of complex simulation models

I have been studying (1) applied discrete choice modelling, (2) consumer choices of seafood, (3) international seafood trade, (4) marine habitat and fishery management, (5) China’s international relation, (6) environment and health, and (7) experimental auctions.

I’m starting to learn ABM and hope to apply the method into my research.

As publically funded science has become increasingly complex, the policy and management literature has begun to focus more attention on how science is structured and organized. My research interests reside at the nexus of science and technology policy, organizational theory, and complexity theory—I am interested in how the management and organization of S&T research influences the implementation of policies and the emergence of organizational strategies and innovation. Although my research involves the use of multiple qualitative and quantitative methods, I rely heavily on agent based modeling and system dynamics approaches in addressing my research questions.